Video cameras are becoming increasingly popular for home, office, and other types of use. For example, video cameras are frequently used to document family events such as vacations, weddings, and graduation ceremonies. In the office, video cameras are often used to record presentations, meetings, user studies and field work, and are often taken on business trips to record people, places, and activities.
Recently systems have been developed to interface personal computers with video cameras so that video can be stored in the memory of personal computers. As a result of this ability to transfer video from video tapes, capture cards, and/or memory sticks, in a multitude of different formats to personal computers, there is an increasing demand for storing, viewing, editing, and transmitting video.
While unedited videos may often be viewed once or twice, they are often stored away since the interesting parts are generally intermixed with longer, less interesting regions. Further, unedited video is often of poor quality resulting from abrupt camera movement or too short or too long views, making it uninteresting to watch while waiting for the next interesting section.
In addition to unedited video often being long and boring, the amount of memory required to store the information is often rather large. A typical unedited video file may often range from a few bytes to hundreds of megabytes. Not only does unedited video often consume large amounts of memory, transmitting the video using e-mail or other electronic transmission systems is often difficult and slow.
Current systems for editing video, such as Adobe Premiere®, are designed for professional video producers and often take hours to assemble and mix video and audio tracks to produce an edited video. Other systems, such as the one described in commonly owned co-pending U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/618,533 entitled “Interactive Custom Video Creation System,” filed Jul. 18, 2000, which is herein incorporated by reference, are easer to use but still require large amounts of user interaction to generate an edited video.
Until now, if a user wanted to electronically transmit a video, they either had to send the entire video or spend several hours creating an edited video and then send the edited video. While professionally editing video may be necessary in some circumstances, it is often undesirable and too time consuming.
Therefore, it is desirable to produce a system and method which segments video with a reduced amount of user input and provides the ability for a user to easily select portions of the video for viewing, storing, and or transmitting.